NYPD Red 6 - James Patterson Page 0,33

Cheryl must have talked for three solid minutes before Kylie said, “He sounds too good to be true. What’s the downside? He can’t be perfect, or he wouldn’t be on the market.”

She listened for a few seconds and then said, “Married to his job? That’s not a deal breaker for me. In fact, it’s a plus. I’m not ready to get serious about—hold on, Cheryl, I’ve got another call coming in.”

She took the second call. This time it really was Captain Cates. I listened as Kylie rattled off a series of “Yes, ma’am”s and then ended the conversation with “We’ll be there in ten minutes.”

She flashed the phone and went back to the first call. “Cheryl, I’ve got to go, but what the hell, I’ll give it a shot. I’ll catch up with you later.”

She hung up and turned to me. “Speed it up, Grandma. We may have just caught a break that’s going to make the governor of New York a happy man.”

“What’s going on?”

“Another home invasion, another rich old lady, another ambulance. Same exact MO.”

I hit the gas. “Where?”

“Lincoln Towers on West End.”

“There are like half a dozen buildings in the complex. Which one are we going to?”

“None of them. We’re going back to the precinct. It happened three weeks ago.”

CHAPTER 29

MOST COPS WORK within the boundaries of their precincts. Criminals don’t. So it’s not unusual for detectives from opposite sides of the city to sit down and share information when one of them spots a pattern.

But when those detectives bring a big boss to show-and-tell, it starts to become something of an event.

Kylie, Cates, and I sat on one side of the table. On the opposite side were Detectives Al Devereaux and Paula Moss from the Two Oh and Reuben St. Claire, zone captain for three detective squads in upper Manhattan.

Devereaux kicked it off. “Three weeks ago an ambulance pulls up to a building on West End. The EMTs tell the doorman they got a 911 call, old lady in respiratory distress—Ida Lowenthal. They go upstairs, the private nurse lets them in, the perps zip-tie and gag the two women, then walk off with seventy thou in jewelry plus another fifteen in cash plus six hundred in spending money the family left for the nurse.”

“But they didn’t touch the nurse’s purse or any of her jewelry,” Moss said.

“Our guys hit the jackpot—almost two million in jewelry and fifty thousand in cash,” I said. “They also took the day-to-day money from the nurse, but nothing that was hers personally.”

“They’re either the same pair or they’re working from the same script,” Moss said.

“We ran our nurse’s name through the system,” Kylie said. “Solid citizen, no history, so far nothing to suggest she was involved. What’s the story on yours?”

“Same deal. Clean. But now I’d like to know if these two know each other or work for the same agency.”

“The doorman wrote down the name on the bus—NYCC Senior Care,” Devereaux said. “He thought the CC might mean Catholic Charities, but it’s completely bogus. LPRs got a read on the plates, but they were stolen.”

“Ours was Morningside Medical. Also phony,” I said. “What about surveillance videos?”

“They knew where the cameras were. They had baseball caps on, and they kept their faces down, looking at the gurney. None of the images are usable. The old lady has dementia, so she was no help, and the best the nurse could give us was two males, one white, one Hispanic, about forty, very efficient—they knew what they were after.”

“How about the stolen jewelry?”

“Moss and I have been checking pawnshops plus eBay and a couple of dozen other websites where they might unload it, but so far nothing.”

“We’re looking at the same MO,” Cates said. “The only difference is we’re dealing with a high-profile victim, so we have everyone from One PP to the governor’s mansion looking over our shoulder. It’s going to help a lot that you caught the pattern so fast.”

“You can thank the boss for that,” Moss said.

Reuben St. Claire was more than a boss. He was a leader. Everyone I knew who had worked under his command said he was the kind of guy who inspired you to be a better cop.

“I caught it in a hurry because I spend more damn time on the computer than I do on the streets,” St. Claire said. “And now that the ball is in your court, I drove over to say two things. First is that everything we’ve got—every interview, every witness,